Why Perfectionism Might Be Ruining Your Life

by Amod Joshi on May 17, 2012

This blog is the summary of notes that we took as we experienced the Tapping World Summit 2012 and it gives our interpretation of the message shared by the key speakers. For more information on this event, please visit the Tapping World Summit 2012 page.

Mary Ayers beautifully put the difference between a perfectionist and a person striving for excellence. Simply put – Excellence is something that can reach, but perfection doesn’t exist. Mary, who is a therapist, coach, workshop leader and speaker, has created an Audio program – “Tap Into Action: How to Go From Zero to Success.”

She went on to explain that striving to excellence is more about focus on ourselves – “How can I win?” or “How can I take it to the next level?” Whereas, perfectionism is more focused outward – “What will they think?” or “Will it look good to them?” While the inner voice of the perfectionist is more negative or criticising – “It is not good enough”, while the people who are working towards excellence hear more positive and motivations statements – “That was some good effort!!”

Downsize of perfectionism is that they can have the same paralysing effect as procrastination. Just that a perfections would say, they are waiting for the right start or they drag the previous task to a perfect finish and hence not starting the next task. Perfectionist suffers from stress, anxiety, criticism, doubt or even fear to make mistakes. Mary gave some very simple questions that we can ask to check if we are operating with a perfectionist mind. Ask questions like – “I gave it my best shot” and then listen to the mind. Does the answer – “Yes, I did!!” comes to mind or does it say “No you did not. You could do it better.” Then we can Tap on the emotion that is causing us to feel to make it perfect. It could be related to some childhood experience where we were told to redo something till be become better, or we heard more often that it was not good enough. Finding the root, helps us to be more specific while Tapping.

Being perfectionist also has a major disadvantage with bringing new ideas on to the table. They spend a lot of time, making it so perfect that they eventually give up on the idea. Mary calls this state as emotional constipation – where people are just bound and not able to get any movement at all. Changing this trait of one’s personality is not something can happen in a flash. It may take a long continuous self-talk or Tapping to change directions. It may also seem that the setup statement “I deeply and completely accept myself” may not gel very well with a perfectionist. For such instances, Mary suggests using – “I’m trying to find a way to accept myself” or “I can accept the fact that I’m going to work on this”.

Mary had variety of scripts that will help people for their own situation. She went through few sequences in the session – “Not sure If I can do the right Tapping”, “Tapping on the Critical voice”, “Tapping on beliefs” and “Tapping to being anxiety down”. There was some good amount of Tapping and even more available in the workbook.

3 take-away points from this session:

Difference between Perfectionism and striving for Excellence

How to determine if we have the perfectionist syndrome?

Variety of Tapping sequences

Did you miss out this event? You can still buy the recordings of these powerful session, plus get a Workbook and many other bonus Gifts – Click here.

This post was written by...

Amod Joshi Co-creator of www.MyLifePuzzle.com and a passionate blogger, who shares his thoughts, ideas and reviews of some of the most inspiring material that will empower people to realise their dreams.